In one of the least surprising turns of events in my lifetime, one of the Chinese gymnasts of the 2000 Olympic Team was found to be underage and the team's bronze medal is being stripped from them and handed over to the United States. Heck, it only took a decade for people to figure out what anyone watching could figure out at a single glance. I wonder how long it will take them to figure out that the 2008 team may not all be 16 years old either? Oh well. It isn't like China's the only ones guilty of overlooking blindingly obvious things. Just look at the steroid era in baseball in the U.S.

Well, this last week has brought both good news and bad news. Bad news first. As you may have noticed, I haven't been around much the last two-three weeks. This is due to my primary computer being down. With my tech support wife leading the way in the trouble shooting, we've firmly identified the cause of the issue. Specifically, the water cooling on our CPU broke down and since it is so quiet normally, I didn't notice at all. I just happily kept on playing Dragon Age over and over again for hours at a time. As you can imagine, playing a game like that with tons of mods loaded at very high graphics setting with no cooling can be hazardous for your computer's health. After opening up the computer and poking around a bit, we've been able to determine that our CPU had FUSED TO THE MOTHERBOARD! When we lifted the CPU up, half of it stayed behind melted to the motherboard. Sadly, this has left us in situation where we are without a usable motherboard, CPU and cooling source. But now we get to the good news. Some of my regular readers may remember my posting a short blog about getting a promotion a few months back. Well, the pay adjustment that you normally expect to accompany an increase in responsibilities has come through. Without going into too much details, let me just say that my yearly salary has had a very impressive bump. Enough of a bump that ordering a brand new Intel 3.16 Duo Core CPU, Asus Motherboard, better video card solution than the 8800GT in SLI that I've been relying on so far (a superclocked GTX 260) and Zalman fan was quite doable. So I've done it. Delivery is expected for Thursday. I'm extremely excited!

Well, it is a little late but I have finished my Mass Effect 2 User Review. As always, if you enjoyed and found my review helpful, please go here and give me a thumbs up. There's a popular theory in organized sports, particularly basketball, about the concept of "overcorrecting". Essentially, if somebody shoots the ball too long and clanks it off the back of the rim one time, he (or she) is very likely to overcorrect and clang it off the front of the rim the next time he shoots and misses. This is a good analogy for what Bioware has done with Mass Effect 2. On the plus side, the baseline fundamentals are there and are rock solid. The visuals, the voice acting, the audio sound track and the magnificent sense of scale are breathtaking and not only equal, but far surpass the original title. Glitches and bugs are almost completely ironed out. From the very first few moments you start playing, you know you're about to enjoy a beautiful experience that builds on and amplifies what you had in the first game. Make no mistake, Mass Effect 2 is one of the best games of the last couple of years and remains a "must buy" for anyone with a gaming pulse, but it has a few issues that keep it from being the flawless offering that we all hoped it would be. In its favor, if there was something from the first game that was frustrating or flawed, then something was done to address it in the second. It just isn't always a good something.

To their credit, Bioware took in the feedback and criticisms from some of the warts in the first game and corrected them. The Mako is unwieldy and difficult to control? No problem. It's completely gone from the second game. There are some balance and combat issues with the character cIasses? Mass Effect 2 has you covered. The character cIasses are completely reworked and your available character customization options are about half of the first title to the point that a lot of the characters are kind of interchangeable. Sometimes the menus and inventory system can be a bit overwhelming? No sweat. The game has stripped down the available options for inventory with regards to weapons and armor to the point where taking the time to browse through your party's equipment is almost as non-existent of an experience as driving the Mako.

The result is a game that is a shooter title masquerading as a role playing game. Almost across the board, the rpg elements from the original are either stripped down or removed entirely. This is a decision that will appeal to some while being a frustration to others. The benefits of these design decisions are immediately obvious. The action in the game is more consistent. Lulls are almost non-existent. The combat in the game is much improved and more exciting. Unfortunately, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Many people buy rpg titles in part because they like experimenting with various character build combinations. They enjoy the thrill involved in finding a rare piece of armor in a shop or out in the field. They like the idea that different armor actually protects differently and that it actually matters that some characters can only wear light stuff and others can wear heavy duty suits. The Mako wasn't a bad concept from the first game. In fact, it was fun to mow down major Geth "tanks" at times with minimal effort. It was the controls of the Mako that were frustrating, not the idea of having an all-terrain tank to drive around. In this and many other areas of the game, each improvement from the first title seems to have been balanced out with a step backward. For example, the original Mass Effect was criticized for large, empty planets that obligated players to drive the Mako around for long lengths of time to find the occasional resource to scan and gather. With Mass Effect 2, that sometimes frustrating experience is removed. Instead it is replaced by, astonishingly, an even more mind-numbingly dull way of gathering resources in the form of "scanning" planets from orbit. Initially this is mildly fun as a change of pace. However, even with a scanner speed upgrade that can be purchased this exercise becomes almost painfully boring after the first couple of times doing it. Continuing a common theme, for a lot of players of the original Mass Effect it was annoying to be in a huge universe that, overall, felt extremely empty because there wasn't much in the way of populated worlds. Mass Effect 2 attempts to fix this by adding a great many more unique combat areas which is nice, but doesn't really address the root problem of not enough "town" type environments to visit. As you recruit each of your companion characters in the game, you will eventually be presented with optional "loyalty" missions to build favor with the character. One character may ask you to go explore a particular place that she was raised in that has left significant emotional scarring. Another might ask you to go and protect her sister from being discovered and taken away by her father. Still another might ask you to help them get past puberty. (Seriously.) Unfortunately, this system usually means that the dialog trees for the many recruitable characters don't go as deep as you might like and once you've switched their status to "loyal" there's a built-in disincentive for a lot of people to keep talking with their companions: there's nothing material to gain On the plus side, each of these requests takes you to a unique and different combat environment. Gone are the days when you felt like a glorified galactic exterminator and every mission seemed like it boiled down to "land on hostile planet X, track down bad guys Y, and then kill them." This is good news! The downside is that often times, there still aren't a lot more "town" types of places to visit than there were in the last go around. The one that are there are quite well developed and each one feels very different from the others. Whether it is landing on the Kling…er Krogan home world and getting a feel for the conditions that make Krogans how they are or exploring the crime and poverty ridden slums of Omega, these areas add detail and feel to the game. There just aren't enough of them. From a story perspective, this game is the middle game of a trilogy and it shows badly. My first thought when I beat the game was, "Wait, that's it?" The story does not get advanced nearly enough in this title from the last one. In fact, in many ways it is a bit of a letdown because it introduces and hints at a lot of different things to come in the future, but never really gets you anywhere in the present. There's a lot of foreshadowing, but not a lot concrete. It fleshes out the history of the Reapers and the Protheans, and seeing more details of what exactly happened to the Protheans is horrific and fills you with a real sense of wanting to play a little longer so you can get closer to preventing it from happening to the current galactic races, but there is definitely an unsatisfied feeling at the end. Adding onto that problem is the issue that a lot of the reactions of the rest of the galaxy just don't make a lot of sense from a realism perspective when carried over from the first title. Nearly everyone you met even for the shortest of time periods who survived the meeting with you from the original game makes a new appearance, but in many cases their reactions to meeting with you again seem very odd. Nowhere is this more obvious than from the reactions of the always irritating galactic council. You see these annoying idiots exactly one time early in the game, and then never interact with them again. Speaking from a personal standpoint, that's a big plus because their reaction to you being right about everything in the first game and even to saving their hindparts is to put their hands over their ears and ignore you yet again in the second game. Saving or not saving the council really makes little difference. You still have no credibility and no support. This is just plain, flat-out not realistic. These people would have to be complete morons not to believe you by now. Another area is the reaction to your "romances" from the first game. Many of them will make repeat appearances, but their reaction to the love of their life returning after appearing to die two years earlier is, shall we say, underwhelming at best. Your dialog options to dig into this reaction are lackluster and this is very frustrating. Still, at the end of the day this is a fantastic new game. While many will feel a bit of a letdown that so many of the RPG elements are stripped down and even eliminated entirely, what is left is still a game that will bring many hours of enjoyment and more than adequately sets the stage for what is hoped to be a thrilling conclusion. True Score Ranking: 9.1

I'm not usually a big fan of Tom Friedman's columns, but credit where credit is due, this is, in my opinion, one hell of a good idea. [quote="Tom Friedman"]

One reason independent, third-party, centrist candidates can't get elected is because if, in a three-person race, a Democrat votes for an independent, and the independent loses, the Democrat fears his vote will have actually helped the Republican win, or vice versa. Alternative voting allows you to rank the independent candidate your No. 1 choice, and the Democrat or Republican No. 2.

Therefore, if the independent does not win, your vote is immediately transferred to your second choice, say, the Democrat. Therefore, you have no fear that in voting for an independent you might help elect your real nightmare - the Republican. Nothing has held back the growth of independent, centrist candidates more, said Diamond, "than the fear that if you vote for one of them you will be wasting your vote. Alternative voting, which Australia has, can overcome that."

Any Aussies among my readers who can comment on how this works in the great down under?

I've been pretty hard on conservatives the last couple of blogs, primarily because these days, with the current state of the Republican Party being dominated by its extremist elements, writing blogs about them is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. It's easy to do, and has a certain amount of guilty fun to it. But I do think that Conservatives have a lot to offer. It is why I read conservatives like David Frum (Former Bush Jr. Speechwriter), Daniel Larison (Senior Writer for "The American Conservative") and Andrew Sullivan (Most read single-person blogger in the U.S. today and United Kingdom style conservative) regularly. If I tend to bash conservatives more than liberals, then only half of the reason is because I agree with liberal ideals a lot more.



The other reason is that I don't like seeing what the conservative party in the U.S. today has become. I think they could learn a lot from the Tory party in the UK for instance. I've said repeatedly, that for the U.S. to retain it's status as one of the leading nations in the world long term, then it needs to have multiple functioning political parties dedicated to advancing the common good of the country as a whole. I don't believe that is currently the case. So today, I'm going to highlight some of the conservative articles that I've read recently that I think were very good.



Daniel Larison of The American Conservative states that if conservatives are going to criticize Obama's treatment of Israel, then they need substantial things to point to that illustrate he's been less than supportive



Patrick Ruffini of The Next Right concludes that Republicans would do better if they had proposed more alternative fixes to the Obama plan.



David Frum argues that conservatives could have gotten some victories in Health Care if they had been more willing to compromise instead of pushing "all-in" to defeat any bill.



Astute readers will notice a common theme here...that I'm pointing to conservatives that are taking issue with their own party and trying to reform from within. They'd be correct. One of the big problems of the Democrats prior to the Clinton years is that they were in the same situation that Conservatives are now: a hostage to the parts of their party furthest outside of the mainstream opinion in the country at the time. Famously, Richard Nixon once offered a Health Care reform deal to Ted Kennedy that was, more or less, slightly more liberal than the one Obama just signed into law. Kennedy declined. Where would liberalism be today if Kennedy had taken the offered victory - effectively compromised a little - and then tried to build on it instead of swinging for the fences and trying to hit a home run? He did not, in large part I suspect for the same reason that Republicans of today were unwilling to compromise. Republicans just suffered their biggest legislative defeat in decades. But you hear no soul searching. No "what could we have done better" or "what did we do that handed Democrats large enough majorities to allow them to achieve this"? Instead, you hear a lot of doubling down and statements "we're going to completely repeal health care!" There are very smart and very thoughtful conservative thinkers out there. The first step towards the Republican Party regaining majority status is to start listening to them instead of the Palins, Becks, Hannitys and Rushs of the world. [quote="Mitt Romney Republican Presidential Candidate"] "Some of my libertarian friends balk at what looks like an individual mandate. But remember, someone has to pay for the health care that must, by law, be provided: Either the individual pays or the taxpayers pay. A free ride on government is not libertarian."

...or at least that is the opinion of approximately one quarter of Republicans according to the results of a newly released Harris Poll. As you can imagine, these results have already gotten some liberal blogs fired up. The Daily Beast has the scoop. (And really, what could be a cooler name than "The Daily Beast"?) [quote="Harris Poll results"] * 67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.

* 57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim

* 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president"

* 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did"

* Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama "may be the Antichrist."

Frankly, in my opinion this is why you have seen so little Republican support for Obama's more-or-less very centrist policies to date. I mean, really, who among us wants to support something advocated by the son of the Prince of Darkness himself? But joking aside, these results should scare anyone interested in good governing in this country. This President won by a pretty large margin in the last election only a year and a half ago.



This isn't some military coup that took place. This is a Democratically Elected leader who got into office after a two and a half years of campaigning. He went through the usual FBI background check and had every single media outfit in the world looking into his background. He's released his birth certificate and had the election commission certify its authenticity.



Despite all of this, just under half of the opposition party thinks that he's completely illegitimate. The whole "birther" movement is not a part of the lunatic fringe of the current opposition party in the United States. It is a mainline and respected idea within the party. All of that, and it isn't even the scariest result of the poll. It is the third scariest behind "* 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is 'doing many of the things that Hitler did' and 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama 'may be the Antichrist.'" Now, I completely understand the counter argument that there were some lunatics on the left during the Bush years who did the whole "Bush is Hitler thing. But the difference is that I do not recall that belief being widespread among the Democratic Party, and I CERTAINLY don't recall seeing the belief supported by prominent Democratic thought leaders. It is in the best interests of this country to have two functioning and participatory parties towards legislating and advancing the common societal good. Right now, I don't think you can reasonably say, with a straight face, that the Republican Party can be described as "the loyal opposition" to borrow from the British vernacular. Imagine if, in Bush's first year in office, he got ZERO Democratic votes for his biggest electoral item on the agenda and THREE Democratic votes on his second biggest item. (With one of those votes later switching over to the Republican Party)

It is with a happy heart that I report that I have finished my first playthrough of the awesomeness that is God of War III. My man crush on Kratos is stronger than ever. Indeed, I think it is appropriate to now take a moment of silence to observe a series that revolutionized and revitalized a specific genre of games. God of War III is unapologetically more of the same to the first couple of games. It starts out violent, bloody and visceral and doesn't ever really depart from that approach. This earns it an "attaboy" award from me. When you get right down to it, God of War III didn't really bring anything new to the table beyond what we'd already seen from the previous two games. It has nicer graphics and a storyline continued from the first two games in the series and that's just about it. It isn't reinventing the wheel. It's just doing what Kratos does...drowning you in a torrential and very satisfying flow of blood and gratuitous guts that feels almost...pure...in its blatantness. I've played the demo to Dante's Inferno and I fully intend to ask for Bayonetta for my upcoming birthday, but at the end of the day I'm willing to lay a wager that both lack the raw, pulsing nature of God of War. I'm still in an extremely good mood today from the momentous passing of Health Care Reform from yesterday, so I think I'll keep today's blog short and to the point and just give a tip of my proverbial hat to Sony for finishing the trilogy with style and panache. Dragon Age Awakenings awaits! ... Damn it's been a good few months for new games!

than this. Yeah, yeah. I know not all of my readers out there are godless liberals like me. No worries. I love you all anyway. I ain't got nothing BUT love for you.



But in all seriousness, I think a couple of decades from now people will look back at the passage of this legislation the same way we now look back on the passage of things like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Social Security or Medicare. This is a historic bill. I'm 30 years old (about to turn 31) and I'm not sure I will ever see a more significant piece of legislation passed again in my lifetime. It has been a long debate. Democrats WILL lose seats over this. Probably a lot of seats. After all, as Matt Yglesias points out... [quote="Matthew Yglesias"] It's true that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society-Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Title I federal education spending, and a suite of other anti-poverty programs-played a roll in the unraveling of the New Deal coalition. At the same time, the Civil Rights Act has not been repealed. Nor has Medicare. Nor has Medicaid. Nor has the Voting Rights Act. Federal aid to education for the poor is more firmly entrenched than ever in the landscape. Some of the other Johnson-era anti-poverty programs have been repealed or substantially scaled back. But we're overwhelmingly living in Lyndon Johnson's America, whereas Barry Goldwater's alternative vision of a backwards and brutal society in which the poor and elderly languish without health care and African-Americans eat at separate lunch counters is so discredited that Goldwater's heirs and admirers generally refuse to admit that this is what he stood for.

Mozoltov my friends. We're watching a historic moment. Depending on what side of the debate you're on, it is either a moment showing the greatness of this country to pass something so significant or something that will eventually lead us into socialist destruction...but either way, there's no doubt that today's events are historic.

With apologies for stealing the title of one of the worst movies of all-time (What's Eating Gilbert Grape?) I'm in the mood for this exact sort of update. As most of my (probably diminished in number) readers are no doubt already aware of, I don't blog - or comment on other peoples' blogs - much anymore. There are a number of reasons for this. 1. The fact that my in-laws now follow this blog 2. Mod duties keep me busy 3. My offline job is light years more challenging than it used to be 4. I lost interest 5. It's been an amazing last few months for game releases that has kept me busy All of these things combined lead to a much less active blog, and which things contribute vary quite a great deal based on the subject matter that I would normally write about. Something that I was talking about with the wifey last night is probably the prime culprit though. We were discussing how, in her job, her boss can hear what she's saying and doing constantly. As some of you may know, I work out of my home most of the time. This has always been one of the great benefits of the job that I have. I LOVE the freedom that working from home allows me. But it does have its drawbacks. First among them is that my boss (who doesn't even live in the same city as I do) does not have nearly as much visibility to what I do as most bosses do. A lot of times this is a good thing. Nobody likes having their boss constantly looking over their shoulder. But it can also be a bad thing. For the first week of April my boss, along with all the new hires for my team, are coming to my city for face-to-face training. When your boss sees you very irregularly, it makes the rare occasions that you DO interact that much more stressful and important. The margin of error is a lot less than normal. My previous boss sat, literally, six feet away from me every day. I saw her constantly. Therefore if I screwed up, I could shrug it off because I knew that she saw all the times when I kicked serious ass. Now, watch this segway... ... ... It's the same with in-laws. If my in-laws were not half a world away, then I wouldn't be bothered as much by the fact that they could potentially be reading every word that I am now writing.



I wouldn't second guess myself when thinking about making a joke along the lines of "the best part about working from home is that nobody can see if you take a break to go look up Internet porn!" They'd know that I treat their daughter extremely well and would cut off several limbs if that is what it took to make her happy. Sadly though, I don't really have this luxury. I see my in-laws once every couple of years at best so I feel a real urge to be on my very best behavior whenever I now write things on this space. And my very best behavior is not what interested the majority of you now reading this in my blog to begin with.



Now, granted, it is worse for them. They don't get to see their lovely daughter nearly as much as they might like. But it also limits how free I feel to really be myself in this blog. Which in turn limits my ability to really blog often because what's the fun of blogging if you can't really speak your mind? It's a very interesting experiment in the freeing aspect of anonymity. When you take away the anonymity factor people don't speak their minds nearly as freely as they did. I don't think of myself as the sort of guy who really cares what MOST people think about me, but I'd be lying if I didn't care about what people who have some influence over my life think. I'm not the same person when on the phone with work that I am here. I'm not the same person with my parents.



Each of us play different roles in our lives that are tailored, to greater or lesser extent, to our audience. All of us are complex individuals. We're capable of showing very different sides of ourselves depending on who we are talking to. We share to a greater or lesser extent depending on such a wide variety of factors. What do you folks think? I've always loved having the people who track me as my readers and, even though I've neglected you all horribly for months, I'm always curious to hear what you have to say.

...could apparently bring me out of my self-induced exile from blogging. Let's not mince words here. This is the best game I've played since its predecessor and The Witcher. If you have a game that you really like, then ultimately what you usually want with a sequel is more of the same and for them to fix the handful of items that you didn't like about the first title. By that criteria, Mass Effect 2 succeeds 150%. It isn't perfect. And I WILL be doing a full review of this game once I have completed it. (Got to do SOMETHING to keep justifying that Top-Reviewer thing...especially since they dropped me from Top-100 to Top-1000) But if you're on the fence about getting this game, stop worrying. It's amazing. Now then! That aside, this isn't going to be a long blog. In the interest of easing my way back into the swing of things, a quick update on where I am at present. Life's going very well. In fact, better than could possibly be expected. Anyone who lives in the U.S. is familiar with our current economic woes. Well, I'm pleased to say that it looks like I'm being able to overcome some of them.



I've currently been offered not one, but TWO promotional opportunities by two different managers that I've worked for over the last couple of years at present. Neither is just a one-step promotion either. I'd be jumping two levels at the company that I work for.